Daily archives: February 26, 2003


Snowballs don't kill people

A Philadelphia man and his wife have been arrested after he opened fire on a group of children because his daughter had been hit by a snowball, leaving a ten year old girl in a critical condition. The NRA blame the snow for the girl’s injuries and say the government should do something about the weather before they think about controlling gun ownership.


Go North Young Man!

Now the Scots have got the right idea about immigration. They positively need incomers to boost the declining and ageing population. They’re targetting visa applicants and students, two good groups from a prosperity point of view, but they might also want to consider some of the economic migrants (translation to Daily Mail speak= “bogus asylum seekers”) who are supposedly flooding the country. Give them minimum wage public sector jobs to get them started and all of a sudden they’re not a drain on the public purse but productive, tax paying members of society.


FBWhy

Another reason why the US terrorist executions policy is a bad thing- the FBI decided that one old white guy was as good as another and issued an arrest warrant for a bloke with the same birthdate as, and the same name as an alias of, a fraudster. Luckily they only wanted him arrested, not killed, though three weeks of incarceration in South Africa won’t do much for a 72 year old’s health. There’s probably a clause in the Patriotism- is- the- last- refuge- of- the- scoundrel Act that means he can’t sue either.
Breaking News– He’s been released after the real fraudster was caught in Las Vegas. (Ah, those good old CSI folks.)


Generals

Well, Command & Conquer: Generals arrived yesterday. I really didn’t want to come in to work today. The graphics are very pretty, even on the lowest resolution and detail settings, though animation became jerky on the highest detail setting. Lots of the best bits from previous C&Cs are there, my personal favourite being the fortifying of civilian structures, and the building method has been heavily modified. Now, instead of the central command structure as the source of all buildings you can use roaming bulldozers (or workers) for construction. Providing you have more than one dozer or doozer you should be able to cope with even the destruction of your command post.

I’m still very much a first world war general- get as many units together as possible and throw them at the enemy in the hope that attrition will work in my favour- and that’s working for me so far. However, the ability to use the landscape is greater than in previous versions, so I’m going to start creating bottlenecks and dropping buildings on the enemy.

(I started out as America, and the first mission was to ‘liberate’ Baghdad because the terrorists were in control there and had Weapons of Cool Graphics [sorry, Mass Destruction]. Hmmmmm.)